Well, now we have it conclusively. It has nothing to do with making the rich in our society pay their “fair share”, no matter how loosely you define (or indeed blatantly misuse) the word “fair”. Nothing to do with ensuring that essential public services are funded, either. No, Ed Ball’s announcement of the Labour Party’s intention to reinstate their punitive 50% top marginal rate of income tax has everything to do with punishing people for daring to still be rich, for having the temerity to succeed.
Daniel Hannan MEP, writing in the Telegraph, ponders the cognitive dissonance behind a proposal to raise taxes without realistic hope of increasing revenues, and wonders if Labour are right to stake their electoral hopes on the British people being motivated primarily by envy and a desire for vengeance:
Labour doesn’t actually think the 50p tax rate will make Britain more prosperous. We know this because, for all but the last few weeks of its 13 years in office, it kept the top rate at 40p. Yet it now brazenly calls a 45p rate “writing a cheque to millionaires”. On one level, this is too silly for words: even if everyone earning £150,000 were a millionaire, on no conceivable definition does demanding less money from someone constitute “writing a cheque”. But Ed Balls has presumably calculated, as Iain Martin adroitly observes, that there are enough votes in envy to cobble together a majority under the uneven constituency boundaries.
In another column he also reflects on the results of a YouGov poll showing that an overwhelming majority of Labour supporters believe that a 50p tax band should be brought back even if it was conclusively demonstrated that doing so raised no additional revenues. The telling visual is here:
Hannan goes on in this second piece to explain the motivations that may cause people to vote as they did in the poll, and has the humility to accept that he (and others on the opposing side of the argument, myself included) probably suffer from similar confirmation biases and reverse rationalisation on this and other matters.
But the inescapable fact is that the motivation for supporting a revenue-neutral or revenue-negative tax increase comes largely down to envy, and that ugly part in the minds of some in the Labour Party (fully accepting that the Conservative Party has other ugly parts of its own) that would rather everyone in the country be worse off and more equal than better off and more unequal:
Envy is an ugly and debilitating condition, but it seems to have an evolutionary-biological basis. The dosage varies enormously from individual to individual, but even toddlers often display a sense that, if they can’t have something, no one else should either. If they had the vocabulary, they would doubtless, like the 69 per cent of Labour supporters, explain that emotion “on moral grounds”. Few toddlers, and few Labour voters, openly admit to being actuated by vindictiveness.
Most policy positions are an expression of some ingrained tendency. For example, we have an instinct to care for the vulnerable, and also an instinct to value reciprocity, and our welfare system results from an interplay between the two. Similarly, the current row about deporting foreign criminals has less to do with their numbers or the nature of their crimes than with our instinct – again, a human universal – about hospitality and its abuse. We shouldn’t be surprised when people who suffer from envy elevate it into a political precept and call it “fairness”.
The concept of fairness has been much abused by politicians (generally those on the left of the political spectrum), particularly since the start of the Great Recession. The worthy desire of Labour politicians to ease the crippling, painful effects of poverty on those less fortunate in our society is not in question, but it is disconcerting when they cling to the idea that punitively high, revenue-neutral tax increases will do anything at all to help the poor other than to cheer them up with the knowledge that wealthy people are also feeling the pinch.
And while we are quibbling about wording, Ed Balls needs to be taken to task in the media for characterising George Osborne’s decision to reverse half of Gordon Brown’s 50p tax hike to a slightly more palatable 45% top rate as a “massive tax cut”. If a five-point reduction in tax rates constitutes a massive tax cut, surely the ten-point increase in income tax instituted in the dying days of the Labour government of which he was a part could only be described, using the same dramatic language, as a gargantuan, devastating, apocalyptic tax increase? And yet, come general election season 2015, it is certain that we will not see Ed Miliband or Ed Balls’ faces smiling down at us from billboards promising “massive tax increases”.
But let us return once more to the YouGov poll results. No other mainstream British political party – not even the Liberal Democrats or the supposedly crazy UKIP – has a majority of their supporters who believe in raising taxes for the rich just to teach them the lesson that hard work does not and should not pay. That distinction is reserved for the Labour Party, a party whose leadership and supporters are now – quite cheerfully, openly and stridently – acting in a dangerously irrational way.
Irrational, that is, if we take them at their word that they have the best interests of all the British people at heart.
Semi-Partisan Politics 